Verbatim - Unexplained Phenomen
November 11, 2007Normally I don’t copy material, but I found a very small article on the back page of the paper and I found it absolutely incredible - what do you think?
“A weird glow is visible in the night sky right now, and astronomers don’t know what to make of it. It’s an obscure and very faint comet that suddenly blazed into astonishing brilliance and is growing larger but dimmer-and while it’s still visible all night long, astronomers are puzzling over the unexpected outburst.”
“It’s really bizarre, said Joseph Miller, a University of California at Santa Cruz astronomer and former director of the Lick Observatory atop Mount Hamilton, near San Jose.”
(NOW HERE IS THE AMAZING PART TO ME) “That thing started out only a few miles in diameter, and suddenly it expanded at a thousand miles an hour until it was as big as the Earth within only a couple of days.” With a decent pair of binoculars-or even with unaided eyes-anyone can see the comet right now as a tiny, fuzzy, white object in the northern sky- wherever fog
doesn’t obscure the sight. It lies just inside the constellation Perseus, below the more familiar constellation Cassiopeia and due east of Polaris, the North Star. It’s called Comet 17P/Holmes and was discovered in 1892 by the British astronomer Edwin Holmes, who spotted it as it appeared to explode in what Holmes thought was an outbust of gas.”
Pretty interesting, eh? Any thoughts?
